Books In Review

The Exile

&

City on the Edge

Homesick in Miami

The Exile: Cuba in the Heart of Miami. By David Rieff.
Simon & Schuster. 220 pp. $21.

City on the Edge: The Transformation of Miami. By
Alejandro Portes and Alex Stepick. University of California Press. 281
pp. $25.

Reviewed by John J. Miller

As the Fidel Castro deathwatch reaches its thirty-fifth anniversary, the
Cuban-American community in South Florida begins to look at its
situation with an uneasy sense of permanence. For many years the
declaration "Next year in Havana!" rolled off Cuban tongues like a
mantra, but in recent times it has fallen into disuse and even become a
cruel joke. The end of Castro could arrive at any moment, but it has
seemed this way for decades. The collapse of communism in the Soviet
Union and Eastern Europe briefly rejuvenated the hopes of Cubans living
in the United States, though it now looks as if their homeland will not
go the way of Romania or Hungary, but of North Korea-a global
anachronism somehow clinging to power despite the sharp turns of
history.

Large numbers of Cubans have gazed toward their native island from
American shores since 1959, when Castro deposed Fulgencio Batista and
thousands of middle-class Cubans fled to the United States. Since then,
these Cubans have assumed the look of a remarkably accomplished
immigrant community-they enjoy high levels of income, employment, and
home ownership, among other indicators of success. They dominate the
political life of Miami and Dade County. And considering their numbers,
they wield enormous influence in Washington, where they play a major
role in shaping foreign policy towards Cuba.

Despite all this, a sorrow grips them. They are not voluntary
immigrants, but exiles forced from Cuba by the rise of a brutal
autocrat. Whereas immigrants typically try to forget their pasts and
forge new futures, exiles try to remember their histories and recover
what they have lost. "Immigrants want to assimilate because, by and
large, they have brought with them unhappy memories of their native
countries. . . . We thought Cuba was better," Cuban-American
banker Luis Botifoll tells David Rieff in The Exile: Cuba in the
Heart of Miami, Rieff's impressionistic and insightful profile of
Cuban America.

The continued rule of Castro leaves the Cuban Americans in a state of
suspended animation. Many of them view Miami as a sort of halfway house,
a place to hang their hats before an imminent return. But as the hiatus
grows longer and their American-born children grow older, the exile
community stands at a crossroads. They have fiercely maintained their
old ways and refused to immerse themselves in American culture-"to
assimilate was to accept that the exile was over, and, on a political
level, that Fidel Castro had won," writes Rieff-but they also fully
integrated themselves into the South Florida economy. If Castro were to
fall tomorrow and democratic reformers assume control of Havana, the
Miami Cubans might contemplate returning. But their pocketbooks would
tug on them with equal force.

This unique duality makes Cuban Americans-or are they American Cubans?-
the citizens of two nations and no nation at once. They feel deeply
grateful to the United States for providing almost unlimited
opportunity, but it is, after all, not a home they chose willingly. "To
watch a mostly Cuban-American crowd at a Miami Heat basketball game or
at an event at the Orange Bowl or at the new Joe Robbie stadium in North
Miami belting out 'The Star-Spangled Banner' was to witness what
appeared on the surface like the most old-fashioned, fervent expression
of immigrant patriotism," writes Rieff. Complexity lies just beneath,
however. As architect Raul Rodriguez confides, "When the U.S. plays Cuba
in some international sport, I don't know whom to root for. It's like
being the child of a messy divorce."

For all its power, this duality is generational. It strongly holds onto
Raul and his wife Ninon, but it only indirectly touches Ruly, their
eleven-year-old, American-born son. Ruly barely knows Cuba. His parents
have taken him on visits, but he does not seem to care for the place. He
feels no bond with it. Unlike his father, he has absolutely no qualms
about cheering for American teams that compete against Cuban teams. He
has a poster of Michael Jordan in his bedroom, not a Cuban flag. When he
heads off to college, he might meet a nice Anglo girl from Tampa and,
like so many other young Cuban Americans, marry outside his ethnic
group. Rieff reports that, sitting at the dinner table with the
Rodriguez family, he "could feel the exile vanishing before me."

According to Tony Quiroga, Raul's business partner, "The exile is
already over." Quiroga suggests to Rieff that the Miami Cubans have
lost their fabled cohesiveness, though neither he nor Rieff fully
examines this thesis. Truth be told, the demography of Cuba and Cuban
America are not much alike. Social and racial divisions could very well
keep these cousin populations from ever again intermingling. The exiles
are mostly white and middle-class. The remaining Cuban population is
over two-thirds black and mulatto, and largely poor. "I'm constantly
aware here of how hard it is to get my fellow Cubans to accept the
country's black heritage," says David Rosemond, a black Cuban who serves
as vice president to the local United Way. "There's a distortion of
memory, but there's also a 'bleaching' of it."

Rieff effectively captures the profound ambivalence of the exile
community and rightly suggests that its future lies mostly in the
multicultural United States, not a post-Castro Cuba. Despite its many
strengths, however, the book contains several flaws. Rieff relies
heavily on upper-middle-class, politically liberal sources. He correctly
points out that the Miami Cubans represent no monolith-they are too
often portrayed in the media as knee-jerk anti-Communist Republicans-but
he fails to grasp fully the community's views on a whole range of
pressing social matters, including its relations with blacks, whites,
Haitians, and recent Central-American immigrants. And despite his having
spent several years in Miami to research the book, it seems as if Rieff
never set foot in a Catholic Church. His analysis of "the cult of
Cubanness" remains quite good, but it might have been improved had he
sought out a few more sources.

Sociologists Alejandro Portes and Alex Stepick fill in some of these
holes in City on the Edge: The Transformation of Miami. Their
book addresses Miami's social landscape more than it does Cuban America
specifically, but the authors do examine an internal rift that Rieff
largely ignores: the Mariel boatlift generation. When a Havana bus
driver rammed his vehicle through the gates of the Peruvian embassy and
demanded political asylum in 1980, he set off an international crisis
that still reverberates in Miami. Within days thousands of Cubans
arrived at the embassy to claim refuge. An embarrassed Castro regime
opened the port of Mariel to all Cubans wishing to leave and invited the
Miami exiles to pick up their relatives. Before long, the famed "Freedom
Flotilla" had ferried 125,000 Cubans to Florida in a Caribbean-style
Dunkirk.

The Cubans who had already established themselves in Miami obviously
felt-and still feel-an affinity for the marielitos, but many
also think the newcomers have blemished the Cuban reputation. Castro, in
fact, used the boatlift as an opportunity to rid his island of those he
considered undesirable. Almost one-half had criminal backgrounds. Many
others had engaged in homosexual relations, which are outlawed in Cuba.
Castro himself was rather upfront about the departing citizens: "Those
that are leaving from Mariel are the scum of the country . . . who are
welcome to leave Cuba if any country will have them," he scoffed at a
1980 May Day celebration during the height of the migration.

Before the boatlift, Cubans had been widely trumpeted in the national
press as a "model minority." They were staunch Cold War allies. Their
businesses flourished. Miami emerged as a Renaissance city and became a
popular tourist destination under Cuban influence. After the Mariel
exodus, however, Cuban Americans found themselves ranked among the
undesirables. A 1982 national poll found that Cubans placed dead last in
the public's view of contributions made by different ethnic groups to
the national welfare. Only 9 percent considered them "good for the
country" and 59 percent deemed them "bad"-the exact opposite of Jewish
poll numbers. "For a minority long accustomed to public praise, such
opinions came as a rude awakening," write Portes and Stepick. Ever
since, the marielitos and older Cubans have traded resentments.

Portes and Stepick ultimately come up short in the very places where
Rieff is strongest. They aim their text primarily at an academic
audience, but they also try to enliven their writing with storytelling
and lengthy quotations. These aspects lend a human voice to what would
otherwise be a rather dry volume, but they lack the sense of seamless
prose craftsmanship that marks Rieff's work. It makes an essential
companion volume, however, and together the two books offer a probing
and textured look at an important ethnic group.

Cuban America is a community in flux, slowly awakening to its permanence
in South Florida. Awaiting a return many of them will never see, they
have made Miami distinctly their own. "For those old enough to remember,
there were ways in which the Miami of 1992 more closely resembled the
Havana of 1958 than did contemporary Havana," notes Rieff. The exiles,
in effect, have built a new Havana-a Havana they fondly remember-in the
heart of Miami. For those who one day return to a post-Castro Cuba, many
will feel homesick anew as they experience a second, and perhaps even
more painful, exile.

John J. Miller is Associate Director of the Manhattan Institute's Center
for the New American Community. based in Washington, D.C.